【文讀assignment #5】epiphany achieved via violent means (deadline: 1/8/2012, 12 a.m.)

In her short stories, Flannery O’Connor brings her characters to a moment of epiphany when it is no longer possible for them to return to the old ways of life. The proud are humbled, the ignorant are enlightened, and the hypocritical are forced to recognize that the discrepancy between their smug surface and its hollow spirituality is the proof of their inadequacy in the eyes of God. For O’Connor, this epiphanal moment can only be achieved by violence and destruction: “In my own stories I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace…. We hear many complaints about the prevalence of violence in modern fiction, and it is always assumed that this violence is a bad thing and meant to be an end in itself. With the serious writer, violence is never an end in itself. It is the extreme situation that best reveals what we are essentially” (“On Her Own Work”).

In the three stories we read (“A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “Good Country People,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge”), can you find any “moments of epiphany” which are produced in extreme violent situations? How do these violent situations “reveal” the hidden message of God? What mysterious transformations have the characters undergone when they are shocked into an awareness of their smug ignorance?

Is the Misfit the devil?

Famous for her rather eccentric and certainly unique literary style, O’Connor produced fiction in which the action of divine grace is worked in a mysterious and even grotesque way. Oftentimes, it is hard to understand the religious message that O’Connor tried to convey to her audience. However, in “On Her Own Works,” she explains to us the gist of her short story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," which is "something more than an account of a family murdered on the way to Florida." The fatal encounter between the character Grandmother and the serial killer “the Misfit”mysteriously allows the action of grace in the Grandmother's soul to take place. As O'Connor writes:

“I often ask myself what makes a story work, and what makes it hold up as a story, and I have decided that it is probably some action, some gesture of a character that is unlike any other in the story, one which indicates where the real heart of the story lies. This would have to be an action or a gesture which was both totally right and totally unexpected; it would have to be one that was both in character and beyond character; it would have to suggest both the world and eternity. The action or gesture I’m talking about would have to be on the anagogical level, that is, the level which has to do with the Divine life and our participation in it…. It would be a gesture which somehow made contact with mystery.

There is a point in this story where such a gesture occurs. The Grandmother is at last alone, facing the Misfit. Her head clears for an instant and she realizes, even in her limited way, that she is responsible for the man before her and joined to him by ties of kinship which have their roots deep in the mystery she has been merely prattling about so far. And at this point, she does the right thing, she makes the right gesture….

I don’t want to equate the Misfit with the devil. I prefer to think that, however unlikely this may seem, the old lady’s gesture, like the mustard-seed, will grow to be a great crow-filled tree in the Misfit’s heart, and will be enough of a pain to him there to turn him into the prophet he was meant to become….

In such a picture, grace, in the theological sense, is not lacking. There is a moment in every great story in which the presence of grace can be felt as it waits to be accepted or rejected, even though the reader may not recognize this moment.”

Therefore, God works in a mysterious way. Like Manley Pointer in "Good Country People," the Misfit is not ridiculed by his creator. O'Connor suggests that the grandmother's "moment of grace" might induce the Misfit to be reborn too. It is possible that the Misfit has been transformed by his mysterious experience with the grandmother.

2011工人團結全球行動影展

English Dept.
2011 台灣國際勞工影展花蓮場
工人團結全球行動
放映時間: 12/20~23 (18:00-21:00) 18:00進場/18:15準時放映
放映地點: 國立東華大學共三講堂

12/20
【血咖啡】24 min
【佛圖之死】17 min
【時尚工業生死鬥】74 min
映後座談人：許甄倚、遲恆昌

12/21
【HTC的血汗品牌之路】36 min
【解構富士康】20 min
【蘋果IPad的真相】7 min
【工佔共和國】60 min
映後座談人：謝若蘭、陳毅峰

12/22
【紅土】20 min
【可口可樂殺人事件】85 min
映後座談人：王君琦、賀光萬

12/23
【非關護照】24 min
【片刻緩和】28 min
【我家裡面有工廠】16 min
【景氣復甦大搜查線】13 min
【新自由主義行不行】12 min
映後座談人：楊華美、吳靜如

歡迎大家踴躍參與!
更多訊息請洽: 2011台灣國際勞工影展
或洽東華大學英美系辦

【文讀 assignment #4】Qs for Toni Morrison's "Recitatif" (deadline: 12/13, 12 a.m.)

Questions for your assignment (choose one from the following questions and answer it with 250-300 words):
1. At the end of "Recitatif," how does Twyla's and Roberta's exploration of the "truth" of what they had seen at St. Bonny's many years earlier affect your sense of the "truth" of later episodes in the story? Is either Twyla or Roberta more reliable than the other?

2. For you, what's the message of this story?

3. Why does Morrison use Maggie--a crippled, mute, deaf old man--as the focus of Twyla's and Roberta's obsession in this story? Toward the end of the story, Twyla says: "Maggie was my dancing mother?" What are the possible implications of this remark?